PSC Meeting 2022-05-13

Participants

• Anna Petrasova
• Helena Mitasova
• Huidae Cho
• Markus Neteler
• Michael Barton
• Vaclav Petras
• Martin Landa
• Vero Andreo

Agenda

The topics proposed were:

• Voting on RFC that are in draft mode - Please have a look at these 3 in advance: 0, 1 and 2. With great pleasure I've followed the issues and PRs about releasing procedures and version numbering/naming, so I believe it's time we discuss (and ideally vote) on those.
• Upcoming releases
• FOSS4G 2022
• GSoC 2022
• Results of student grants and setting a date for the next call
• Michael Smith news about sponsoring and Opencollective - follow up on previous meeting
• rgrass(7): follow up on previous meeting

[0] ​https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/RFC/8_LanguageStandardsSupportPython

[1] ​https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/RFC/4_ReleaseProcedure

[2] ​https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/pull/2357

Minutes

• Draft RFCs:
  • We are good with the one about Python.
    • Move to PR.
    • Describe the practical aspect when support is dropped on the main branch before the release happens.
  • Releases:
    • Shall we keep the RCs system when all changes go through PRs?
    • Shall we try to form a testing group (students, users)? (Developers and power users tend to not find the bugs that beginner and intermediate users do.) This would require a proper guideline to test. We are thinking mostly about testing if binaries actually work in different environments.
    • Make 2nd RC optional?
    • Freeze makes more sense for branching, and esp. for major and minor versions, but not for micro releases which are by definition only fixes.
    • Soft freeze = feature freeze, no more new features. Hard freeze = code freeze, no more changes and tag the release.
    • Vaclav: simplify/rewrite RFC 4, move to PR.
  • Version numbering:
    • Start using all the numbers (odd and even) for releases.
    • Vashek will update the RFC in relation to fixed (frozen) code for a release, change status to Ready (?), and initiate the motion.
• Move Trac RFCs to GitHub to keep all of them in on place (Anna). In general, we tag them for discussion and then create motions via email to vote.
• GSoC 2022: No students for this year. Two applied. None passed coding challenges.
• Results about student grants: Vashek commented that Caitlin was very happy with it. GSoC finishes in August, so after that would be a good timing for next round.
• Vero commented on the follow ups
  • no contracts needed for sponsors, so green light to create different types/categories of sponsors
  • Updates about rgrass (all is well, rgrass7 will be replaced by rgrass)
• Releases:
  • 7.8.8 in the pipeline
  • 8.0.2 is out
  • 8.2.0 due by May 20, RC2 is overdue couple days, but there's a Jupyter-related bug which seems a major showstopper, so we need to fix that.
• Weblate vs Transifex
  • weblate automatically creates PRs so we prefer it
  • send out a call to translators to move to weblate (Huidae)
• GRASS in Windows:
  • Status of PDAL and OpenMP support in Windows. PDAL is a priority, OpenMP not so much.
  • GRASS does not start in some Windows computers because of permission issues: Windows wants writing permission over grass.py (seems to affect only standalone installer)